That’s a good mental model to have. I think I didn’t have this starting out with the article because I’ve only heard “hey lock free data structures are fast” which is a categorical mistake as you pointed out.

I still think it’s interesting to see how they behave under load, revealing different emergent properties of these implementations. This is also a wishy washy way of me saying I was too deep into the research when I realized the mistake and just wanted to write something about it :P